Programming note: We haven't forgotten about responding to Florian Guessgen's latest Stern piece. Holiday travels and family gatherings have simply delayed things a bit. We will have that up for you within 48 hours. We appreciate your patience and wish you all the best in 2006!

It is so heart warming to see Gerhard Schroeder looking out for the little guy this holiday season. Not long after leaving office this past November, he took on two lucrative jobs, one with his old Maennerfreund Vladimir Putin at Russia's state-controlled gas giant "Gazprom." Of course while he was in office, Schroeder was instrumental in negotiating a multi-billion dollar pipeline deal with Russia and Gazprom on behalf of the German state. His decision to join the company was met with a bit of token outrage in the German media before the subject was promptly dropped. No Watergate knives were brandished and the ex-Chancellor has been largely left to continue about his merry business.

And Schroeder is certainly a busy man these days. As always, he's deeply committed to the ideals of democracy and social justice. Now his new company, Gazprom, is being used by the Putin government to twist the arm of the newly elected, democratic Ukrainian government led by Victor Yushchenko. (Some might recall that Yushchenko was mysteriously poisoned...in classic KGB style...not long before his successful election run.) Anyway, Putin and Gazprom are not happy with the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and want to lash out at the former Soviet satellite by raising natural gas prices this winter...by over four times! Merry Christmas neighbor...Vladimir and company would prefer to quash your little democratic movement! The Brussels Journal reports:

"Unfortunately, as we reported earlier, President Putin has Western collaborators who assist him in his political and geopolitical strategies. The most infamous of these is the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Last September, during his final weeks in office, Herr Schröder signed an agreement with Russia to build a pipeline on the Baltic seabed. The pipeline, which is to be finished by 2010, will provide Germany with gas directly from Russia, bypassing transit through the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Immediately after his resignation as Chancellor, Schröder was given a lucrative position as an advisor of the Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom. The gas deal is generally perceived as being a private pension scheme which Schröder – a Socialist – has provided for himself.

The new pipeline will allow Russia to squeeze the nations that it occupied until fifteen years ago. One of these countries is the Ukraine. ... Such prices would, however, bankrupt Eastern and Central European nations. Moscow has apparently forgotten that it was the Russian imposed Communist dictatorship which caused the dire conditions these countries are in today. Russia has a historical debt to these nations but, with the help of an immoral German Socialist, President Putin (a former Colonel of the Soviet secret police KGB and hence one of those directly responsible for the crimes of the Communists) intends to ignore this."

So far Gerd has refused to unleash his world-famous negotiating skills to resolve the crisis with Ukraine. And the German media has absolutely no interest in investigating the ex-Chancellor's obvious (and massive) conflict-of-interest in taking the Gazprom post just weeks after leaving office. Why would they? They know that, ideologically, Gerd-baby is one of theirs...a member of the German leftist-elite. So they refuse to ruin his reputation any more than necessary. In fact, SPIEGEL ONLINE is already writing conciliatory pieces praising Schroeder as a "gifted instinct politician" to placate their readership.

This much is clear: If George W. Bush or Tony Blair ever pulled a similar stunt and took a job at Halliburton just weeks after leaving office, they'd be in hot water with the German media for years and the talk of scandal would have no end. They would be under even more "massive pressure" in the German media than they already are.

But this is Gerhard Schroeder folks. The man who stood up for "peace" against the USA in 2002-3. Had he succeeded in his quest for "peace", Saddam could still be in power shoveling kids into mass graves and all would be well. In fact, Schroeder was so committed to "peace" that he even supported selling European arms and nuclear reactors to the "peaceful" Communist Chinese government. And because of this commitment, Schroeder will always be fondly remembered by his compatriots in the German media. Never mind his total failure to solve the domestic unemployment crisis. Never mind his pandering to dictators, thugs and oligarchs from China to the Middle East to Russia. Never mind his party's massive losses in state elections and abysmally low ratings throughout his administration. Never mind any of that. Gerd is, at his core, one of them. And that's all that really matters.

Have you ever wondered about the German government's soft policy towards the Iranian Mullah regime?

Follow the money...

For the last 25 years, the German government has offered its good offices to the anti-Semitic Mullahs in Tehran with a shamelessness unrivalled by any other western government. ...

Germany is today by far the most important supplier of goods to Iran and its exports are increasing at a steady 20% per year. In 2004, German exports to Iran were worth some €3.6 billion. At the same time, Germany is the most important purchaser of Iranian goods apart from oil and Iran’s most important creditor.

You need to read the complete version of Matthias Kuentzel's analysis (Are 500,000 Keys to Paradise Enough?: Germany "Confronts" Ahmadinejad) at the indispensable Transatlantic Intelligencer...

2006 will be Kofi Annan's last year as UN Secretary General - and now already he is applauded by all sides. ... German UN ambassador (Gunter) Pleuger: "Kofi Annan is the most impressive and most successful of the five Secretaries General I worked with ... the UN is equated with the person Kofi Annan."Martina Buttler, New York Radio Correspondent for ARD (Largest German Public Broadcasting Organization)

Oops - George W. Bush didn't start the renditions program that has got most of the German media working themselves up into a frothing frenzy over the decline of American democracy: it started on Bill Clinton's watch!

The CIA's controversial "rendition" program to have terror suspects captured and questioned on foreign soil was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counterterrorism agent told a German newspaper.

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.

"President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda," Scheuer said, in comments published in German.

"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."

Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, said that he developed and led the "renditions" program, which he said included moving prisoners without due legal process to countries without strict human rights protections.

"In Cairo, people are not treated like they are in Milwaukee. The Clinton administration asked us if we believed that the prisoners were being treated in accordance with local law. And we answered, yes, we're fairly sure."

At the time, he said, the CIA did not arrest or imprison anyone itself.

"That was done by the local police or secret services," he said, adding that the prisoners were never taken to US soil. "President Clinton did not want that."

He said the program changed under Clinton's successor, President George W. Bush, after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

"We started putting people in our own institutions -- in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. The Bush administration wanted to capture people itself but made the same mistake as the Clinton administration by not treating these people as prisoners of war."

He accused Europeans of being hypocritical in criticizing the US administration for its anti-terror tactics while benefiting from them.

"All the information we received from interrogations and documents, everything that had to do with Spain, Italy, Germany, France, England was passed on," he said. (emphasis added)

(If you have a basic knowledge of German, read the highly interesting full interview in the weekly "ZEIT")

It is a safe bet that the whole hysteria over renditions will quickly subside now that the cuddle boy of the German media, Bill Clinton, has been named as the program's inventor...

Can we please move on to the Bush administration's next monumental scandal: eavesdropping on international calls of terrorist suspects without warrants? Such horrible things for sure didn't happen under Clinton's reign!

A former German government minister, his wife and three children were kidnapped in Yemen on Wednesday, local officials said, and one of their captors said their lives would be at risk if Yemen used force to free them. (...)

Chrobog, 65, was Germany's ambassador to the United States from 1995 to 2001.

This November he was quoted in our blog as a admirer of "soft power". He will need any kind of power now, soft or hard.

Why he would travel to Yemen during these troubled times is beyond me. Having a history of sharp anti-American criticism ("America is turning into a police state"), Chrobog probably assumed he'd be safe...

Another proof - as if we needed one - of the unbiased, unparalleled quality of the German media's reporting on American politics: the Patriot Act.

The facts:

Dec. 14, 2005:The House voted to renew a modified USA Patriot Act to combat terrorism on Wednesday and sent the bill to the Senate The vote in the House was 251-174, with 44 Democrats joining 207 Republicans. "Renewing the Patriot Act before it expires in December is literally a matter of life and death," said Rep. Ric Keller, R-Fla.

Dec. 22, 2005:A much-debated domestic surveillance law won a reprieve last night when senators agreed to continue it for six months to allow House and Senate negotiators to resume efforts next year to rewrite it for the longer term. ... House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., has shown little willingness to renegotiate the four-year extension his chamber had approved. "Any talk of a short-term extension is fruitless," his spokesman Jeff Lungren said several hours before the Senate deal was announced. "Chairman Sensenbrenner will not accept anything less than a four-year extension of the Patriot Act."

Congress on Thursday approved a one-month extension of the Patriot Act and sent it to President Bush in a pre-Christmas scramble to prevent many of its anti-terrorism provisions from expiring Dec. 31.

The Senate, with only Sen. John Warner, R-Va., present, approved the Feb. 3 expiration date four hours after the House, with a nearly empty chamber, bowed to Rep. James Sensenbrenner's refusal to agree to a six-month extension. ...

Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the shorter extension would force swifter Senate action and had the support of the White House and Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. ...

"A six-month extension, in my opinion, would have simply allowed the Senate to duck the issue until the last week in June," the Wisconsin Republican told reporters.

The fiction:

Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Dec. 23, 2005:The Next Low Hit for BushU.S. President George W. Bush again had to accept defeat in the House. The U.S. Parliament decided to approve only a one-month extension for the anti-terror laws.

News AgencyAFP (Agence France Press), Dec. 23, 2005:Bush Again Duped in Dispute Over Patriot ActThe House in Washington against the will of U.S. President George W. Bush has approved only a 5-week extension of the anti-terror laws of the Patriot Act. ... For the U.S. government, who initially wanted to extend the law indefinitely, the decision of the House means a heavy defeat.

To sum up things: The House rejected the Senate's proposal of a 6-month extension and approved just a one-month extension with the intention to force the Senate to accept a4-yearextension. So this was not a defeat for President Bush - rather, the House's decision gives his 4-year proposal a renewed chance.

The German media's reporting on the matter can safely be described as misleading, with a massive anti-Bush bias. On the other hand, one might argue that the German media are simply clueless about U.S. politics.

Based on this interview one might well question the psychological status of former hostage Susanne Osthoff:

'My kidnappers were not criminals'

A former German hostage who spent 24 days in the hands of unknown captors in Iraq has said that her kidnappers were not criminals and had demanded humanitarian aid for Sunni Arab regions.

Speaking to theAl-Jazeera satellite channel, Susanne Osthoff said her captors told her not to be afraid as her kidnapping was "politically motivated".

"Do not be afraid. We do not harm women or children and you are a Muslim," she quoted them as saying. "I was so happy to know that I had not fallen into the hands of criminals."

Osthoff, a Muslim convert and Arabic speaker, said her captors demanded German humanitarian aid for Iraq's Sunni Arabs and stated clearly that they did not want a ransom.

"They said we don't want money ... Maybe we want from Germany ... hospitals and schools in the Sunni triangle [area northwest of Baghdad], and they would like to get money in the form of humanitarian aid."

She described her captors as "poor people" and said that she "cannot blame them for kidnapping her,as they cannot enter [Baghdad's heavily fortified] Green Zone to kidnap Americans."

She said she lived with her captors in a clean place and that they treated her "well". ...

Susanne Osthoff and friends

This has got to be another evil trick by Bush&Rumsfeld Inc. - incapacitating Iraqi terrorists ability to kidnap Americans by not allowing them to enter the Green Zone! Shocking!

BTW... there is a suspicion - probably never to be proven - that Osthoff was released in exchange for Hizbollah terrorist Mohammad Ali Hammadi, convicted of killing Navy diver Robert Stethem in Beirut during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight.

Oh, and Mrs. Osthoff contemplates a return to Iraq in the near future (her subsequent kidnapping is a safe bet if terrorists are still not permitted to enter the Green zone).

Are there any other Arab killers of U.S. military personel in German prisons?

You know, just in case...

Update: Great assortment of comments at LGF. My favorite: "Give her back ... I know that they don't give refunds but maybe the Germans can get store credit."

When attempting to convince the American friends that Germany is really on their side, German diplomatic elites often point to Germany's miniscule training program for Iraqi police. Well, it turns out that the program itself is so pathetic that even the Iraqis see little point in continuing. Here are excerpts from a report from Deutsche Welle, a source actually sponsored by the German government:

Iraq Stops Sending Police for German Training

Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Baqer Sulagh has criticized the training of Iraqi police recruits by German experts in the United Arab Emirates and said they would no longer participate in the program.

In an announcement whose timing may be more than mere coincidental, Sulagh said he expressed his dissatisfaction to Germany's ambassador to the UAE and added that they were seeking "training programs which were more serious and more effective."

"We aren't convinced by the level of training of the Iraqi police officers by the German experts, nor by their barely seriously manner," the minister said Tuesday during a press conference in Abu Dhabi, according to the UAE news agency Wam. (...)

In February, then German Interior Minister Otto Schily visited the Al Ain military camp in the United Arab Emirates to see for himself how German police officers were training a first batch of 30 Iraqis.

Schily was surprised see a number of recruits at the course who would evidently derive little benefit from training in hand-to-hand combat because they were physically unsuited to it.

"There are weaknesses in this program," Schily said. "But we know that Iraqi policemen lead dangerous lives and we can only admire them for taking on such a job."

In the meantime Schily has left the German government and the complaint about ineffective German training methods will land on the desk of his successor Wolfgang Schaüble.

Isn't the German government's commitment to the American friends just overwhelming? They can't even manage to train groups of 30 Iraqis without the program breaking down. The article actually suggests the German authorities may have caved to terrorist demands in ending the program as well. With "allies" like this who appease the Islamofascists at every turn...who needs enemies?

On various occasions we’ve reported on the aggressive articles against the American government in the conservative FAZ’s Cultural section. The December 9 edition contains some nice examples of the FAZ Cultural section’s openly polemical style.

The occasion is the conferring of the Nobel Prize on Harold Pinter and the speech he gave on this occasion. Hubert Spiegel (sic!) writes:

"Probably nobody, not even its closest allies, views recent American politics without great concern. Everyone knows that American’s leadership unscrupulously lied to its own citizens and to the whole world about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction."

Everyone knows? A better formulation would be: "Everyone who works for the cultural section of the FAZ knows..." I mean, these folks are so smart - they know deep down in their heart that Bushitler Bush lied, though he never admitted to it, and no proof for a lie was ever provided.

In the same edition Elke Heidenreich, a left-wing book critic with limited intellectual appeal, gets the opportunity to criticize Bush at a level that has become the trademark of the FAZ cultural section. She calls the U.S. government a "gang" that is fittingly "charged with murder."

Dear Mr. Pinter, To be honest, I wasn’t really happy about your getting the Nobel Prize; there were more eligible people on the list, don’t you think? ...

I’m glad now even so. Because what you hammered home to the academy, to the USA and to all of us in your speech has something in it that rivals an earthquake. Just as Mrs. Rice hinted that no mistakes are allowed when it comes to torture, you charge the whole gang with murder. That fits.

You have to deal with it amid this fraudulent Christmas schmaltz, but it’s high time. I live in a country that hasn’t been dragged into this war. Yours unfortunately has, so I understand that you must be doubly angry. Let’s see what happens now. Let’s see whether a Nobel Laureate’s word still packs any punch. And best wishes with the prize from the bottom of my heart. Your Elke Heidenreich (article not available online)

In a commentary on the front page of the same day’s FAZ, Johannes Leithäuser challenges the new German government to dedicate itself to the “procurement of a better appreciation of the United States among the German public as well as of Europe and Germany in America.” As far as the "appreciation” of Germany in America is concerned, further efforts are certainly unnecessary: According to a poll conducted by the German Embassy in the USA, only 30% of Americans consider German-American relations to be good or very good.

Against the backdrop of coverage in the German Media, this statistic seems excessively high to me…

It seems our article on a recent Stern article received a major reaction from the author. As usual, he falsely attempts to smear Davids Medienkritik as a far-right publication. It's not suprising, but it is rather typical and quite regrettable that so many in the German media choose to smear us and call us names when confronted with our arguments.

At the moment we are in the process of analyzing and composing a response to Mr. Guessgen's latest defense of his thesis. But for now we want to set the record straight on one point:

FAZ and the "Conservative Click Guerilla" Reference

As a part of his disingenuous attempt to characterize us as a part of the far-right and drag our reputation through the mud before the Stern readership, Guessgen writes that FAZ.net called us the "conservative click guerilla." What he doesn't tell readers is that this term originated from SPIEGEL ONLINE's angry reaction to Davids Medienkritik several days earlier. FAZ.net almost jokingly wrote of the "conservative click guerilla" in an article primarily aimed at criticizing SPIEGEL's overbearing approach to our call to vote on one of their polls in March 2004. In that action, Davids Medienkritik never asked anyone to vote improperly or advocated "freeping" the poll. We simply asked our readers to participate in an online vote and we were subsequently linked and the action took on a life of its own.

Again, we will have a response to Mr. Guessgen's latest editorial in the very near future. Stay tuned...

Davids Medienkritik proudly presents the English version of the newest WELT article from Berlin Aspen Institute's Jeffrey Gedmin.

Adjusting the LawDecember 14, 2005 By Jeffrey Gedmin

Arno Widmann comments in the Berliner Zeitung: “the Americans are waging a war against human rights" ("einen Krieg gegen die Menschenrechte"). The same day the Berliner Zeitung ran a long page two story on the CIA's empire of evil. Shoddy Michael Moore-style journalism is popular. Of course, the United States hardly does itself favours. The Bush team seems arrogant and seldom wants to admit a mistake.

It all distracts dangerously from a more serious debate about how we fight the war on terror. Critics argue that the United States cannot have carte blanche to do whatever it wants in Guantanamo. The Bush administration says, Read the Geneva Convention—it does not apply to Al Qaeda prisoners. Both are right. Why does it take so long to get to the inevitable: the development of international law to meet the needs of the current era. We have done this before. That's how we got the Geneva Conventions. Now we need laws that apply to combatants who do not wear a uniform, who hide among civilians and who deliberately target unarmed innocents. These are not the criminals our domestic judicial systems or the international law have been equipped to deal with.

Then there is torture. I yearn to say those words "torture is never justifiable!" I feel confident with other moral absolutes. Slavery is never justifiable. Terrorism is never justifiable. The United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory, bans torture as well as other acts of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Did you know "cruel, inhuman and degrading" can include giving sodium pentathol ("truth serum") to a terrorist who has information about a pending attack? I am not interested in degrading anyone. Nor am I interested in punishment or revenge by the way. I do want information, though, that can prevent further massacres. I want an honest and serious debate about how we get that information.

This U.S. debate is being led by Republican Senator John McCain. McCain has credentials. He spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison and was tortured much of the time. McCain says "No" to torture: any kind, any time, any circumstance, any place. This includes brutal tactics--the cruel, inhuman and degrading stuff--that may fall technically short of torture, such as making a prisoner stand for a long period of time or blasting prisoners with strobe lights and loud rock music. This is presumably the semantic game the Bush administration is playing when it says it does not torture. There is another side to the debate. Like McCain, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post says torture is a "monstrous evil." In an essay in the Weekly Standard magazine, Krauthammer argues for an absolute ban on all forms of coercion by military personnel. He professes revulsion over the "sick sadomasochism" of Lynndie England and her cronies at Abu Ghraib. But then Krauthammer wants exceptions. He calls for specialized agents--and not just anyone with CIA credentials--who in exceptional, life-saving circumstances would seek permission from the highest political authorities in the country (or from a special judicial body) to interrogate aggressively.

Before we ignite an anti-American (or anti-Gedmin) tirade, please recall that Germans themselves are consumers of information obtained through unsavoury techniques. It seems it is hard to escape ugly dilemmas in the war against Islamo-Faschism. The unpleasant truth is: Aggressive interrogation methods have already saved lives.

This may be what German foreign minister Steinmeyer had in mind when he warned last week against frivolous accusations or judgments Combating the terrorists, says Steinmeyer, poses the most difficult choices for the authorities. I have no doubt. Let's put platitudes aside and let a serious debate begin.